books 3-31-05

William Maxwell: A Literary Life
By Barbara Burkhardt, University of Illinois Press, 2005, 308 pages

Though it has been more than 10 years since my husband
moved to the Midwest from Boston, his amazement at the prairie remains
fresh. Driving to Chicago, he’ll point out the window and exclaim,
“Look at that!” Expecting a buffalo, or something similarly
unique, I see only empty space. But to him, the uncluttered landscape that
I take for granted is still miraculous. William
Maxwell: A Literary Life examines an
artist with a similar reverence for a place he called “the meeting of
earth and sky.” Though Maxwell left his beloved Lincoln, Ill., at age
14, he would return time and again in his writing. Author Barbara
Burkhardt, an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois
at Springfield, has turned her substantial knowledge of Maxwell’s
work and her unprecedented access to his papers into the first major
critical study of this important Illinois author.

Maxwell, who died in 2000, is best known for his long
career as an editor for the New Yorker and for his award-winning 1980 novella So Long, See You Tomorrow. The story,
based on an actual 1921 murder/suicide in Lincoln, is considered
Maxwell’s masterwork. Although Burkhardt covers his years as an
editor and friend to famous writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and John
Updike, she is more concerned with Maxwell’s own development as an
artist. She begins by taking us back to a terrible day in 1919 that changed
him forever, the day the 10-year-old boy learned that his mother had died
of the Spanish influenza. It was the day, he said, after which “the
shine went out of everything.”

Burkhardt unveils Maxwell’s career
chronologically. In doing so she helps the reader understand the
underpinnings of his craft. Maxwell believed that structure, as an element
of story, was as integral to meaning as character or plot. He would type
sentences, cut them out with scissors, and glue them in different
combinations until he felt that they were right. Burkhardt, in similar
fashion, shows how each of Maxwell’s novels fit into the pattern that
would become his body of work. She fashions a mosaic depicting how his
talent grew, how one work led to another, better book, culminating in his
masterpiece, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Maxwell underwent years of psychoanalysis under the
famous practitioner Theodor Reik, and Burkhardt shows how the analysis
influenced Maxwell’s work. It is ironic that Reik encouraged his
client to let his characters be “home-free” when one would be
hard pressed to find any writer whose characters are more bound to home
than Maxwell’s. Interiors and objects are important symbols in his
work. In day-to-day life, his typewriter was such an object. At her first
meeting with Maxwell in Manhattan in 1991, Burkhardt discovered that it
would not be an ordinary “type” of interview. After each
question, he inserted a piece of paper into his Coronamatic and hammered
out his answer. Perhaps, in doing so, he hoped that she would arrange his
responses in the cut-and-paste manner he found so workable. That he
continued to see her often, even asking her to catalog his correspondence,
attests to the trust he felt in her abilities. He would not be
disappointed.

Burkhardt’s own prose is by turns spare,
straightforward, and rich. In discussing the short story “Over by the
River,” she describes Maxwell’s setting the scene as
“unrolling it gingerly like a Chinese scroll that, right to left, reveals glimpses of
life lining the river walk.” Her careful explication is literary
criticism at its best — free of the jargon that makes much of this
genre unreadable. No buffaloes here, just a clear view of what’s
important. Those familiar with Maxwell’s work are reminded how good
it is. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of his company, William Maxwell: A Literary Life
will serve as a fine introduction.